Larger Than Worlds
by luxsola
Summary: Larger Than Worlds is a Mass Effect story featuring a humanity that never developed eezo tech, and so developed new technology in isolation for centuries before First Contact. It is similar in premise to Transcendent Humanity, but with a much stronger character focus. TW: Violence, frank portrayal of death and the emotions that come with it.


_Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,_

 _And death shall have no dominion._

-Dylan Thomas

CODEX ENTRY: Humanity

Unlike every other known spacefaring race, humanity does not make use of Element Zero or the Mass Effect in its ships. As their home system contains no Element Zero, and they inherited no technology from the Protheans, humanity advanced along an entirely different path, a path including consciousness uploading, the production of complete adult bodies of any age from DNA and raw chemicals, and the construction of a partial Dyson Shell, the last of which holds most of humanity's population of roughly two trillion as of the year 2657 Galactic Standard.

Commander John Shepard of the Human Stellar Navy was nearing the end of the sixth century of his theoretically immortal life, and was beginning to feel what was technically known as "immortality induced ennui", but more commonly was called "immortality blues."

He was not suicidal. In fact, he was quite the opposite. He loved being alive, and he considered it a large part of his reason for being to defend life, but he could not help but feel like he was meant for more than what he was doing.

So he was dozing in a hammock on the beach, absentmindedly sipping from a half drunk beer and thinking about his life. Officially he was on shore leave, but after completing his mandatory training, and then every optional training he was eligible for, active duty did not seem all that different from shore leave.

Humanity was both completely unified and, as far as he was aware, completely isolated. They maintained a strong military, in preparation for the return of the beings that wiped out the Protheans, but the message that warned them of them was discovered over two thousand years ago, and these days even the most paranoid began to doubt they would ever show up.

The military had peaked in power relative to population over five hundred years ago, and had merely been maintaining its size since, as the population grew and grew. He suspected that if nothing happened, Humanity would begin to reduce the size of the military within a few hundred years., The people now in the military would likely spend their time in combat sims designed more to entertain than to prepare for a fight.

He felt a sudden strange anticipation, like waking up just before your alarm goes off. He knew at once it meant an urgent message. The message unfolded in his consciousness, taking over his attention without needing his volition. To his shock, it was labeled priority zero. He had never even heard of priority zero. The highest he had ever received was a priority one message, informing him of his commission as an officer.

[QUOTE]During a mining operation for fresh water on Pluto's moon Charon, an artifact of alien construction was discovered. Possibly Destroyer, possibly Prothean. More information to follow. All military and scientific personnel, please stand by.[/QUOTE]

Shepard creased his forehead. "Artifact" was vague. Was it a ship? A weapon? A space station? Or could it be one of the "Gates" that The Message spoke of? They had always assumed that the Sol Gate had been destroyed or removed by the Protheans who had warned them not to trust it.

A few taps on the datapad brought up The Message, the only thing the Protheans left for Humanity before they were wiped out some fifty thousand years ago. He knew its content by heart, as nearly all humans did, but it helped to look at it again, to see the message - _The Message-_ carved as it was into the rock, over and over again in dozens of languages, in pictograms, in sculptures, in whatever the ancient race thought would convey the ideas and preserve the meaning to the nascent race of humankind.

 **"Humanity is not alone. Humanity is not safe. THEY are coming. THEY destroyed our race, but we here remain. THEY will not stop looking for us. We will leave, and THEY will not find you. But THEY will return, eventually. Do not trust the Castle or its Gates."**

Could this be it? Would this discovery trigger the return of the Destroyers? Would they survive if it did? What could he as an individual do to help?

He sat on the edge of the hammock for a while, pondering. When he reached a conclusion, he stood up, clapped his hands together, and spread them out in a sweeping motion. The control panel for the virtual world appeared in front of him, and he chose a different one.

Simulation: Combat training, single user.

Terrain: Random.

Enemy Type: Random.

The simulation faded around him, until he was just a naked body floating in a vast and formless void. Then he was not even that, just a mind, briefly perceiving nothing but his own thoughts. He hated those moments. The brief transitional period between simulations felt far too much like what he imagined death must be like.

The world around him became a military barracks with a weapons locker, a bunk bed, and a single tube, resembling in form and function a human sized version of the pneumatic tubes used by banks in the distant past. His body, previously appearing and acting identical to a typical human organic body, was now a perfect simulation of a human war body.

Based on designs for an extremely impractical suit of power armor that never entered production, the standard issue N7 General Purpose Combat Platform. stood roughly 6'6" tall and weighed almost four hundred pounds. After humans developed the technology to upload their minds into computers, the designs were revisited, modified to be used by an uploaded pilot, and put to the test. Seven generations after the first hastily modified suit, the N7 was now a fully equipped war machine.

He glanced at the weapon rack, then began selecting his armament. Given that he had no idea what kind of enemies he would be facing, or where, he opted for weapons that would be useful against a wide variety of enemies, rather than the specialized equipment he might have chosen with more information about the upcoming battle..

He lifted a standard issue M5 General Purpose Weapon Platform "Accipiter" off the rack, and pressed it over his right shoulder, where it promptly secured itself to his armor. With a practiced nonchalance born of decades of training and experience, he chose half a dozen ammo packs and weapon mods and attached them to his hips, thighs, and the small of his back.

Standard battle rifles did not actually require ammo packs to fire. They had an internal micronuclear power source, and actual 'ammunition' was a magnetized iron-tungsten alloy block, which would be carefully laser-cut into pieces on demand and fed into the culmination of two and a half millennia of coilgun research.

The projectiles themselves weigh only a gram, but the kinetic energy of a projectile scales up linearly with mass, and exponentially with velocity, so for conventional dumb-ammo weapons, the latter was usually the priority. The ammo packs were for when conventional projectiles were inadvisable or ineffective, and contained various modifications to the simple, but broadly useful standard ammunition.

The weapon mods changed the function of the weapon in some way, perhaps increasing the range and damage at the cost of fire rate, or using larger projectiles at the cost of introducing ammunition concerns. They were not upgrades. Any modification that proved to be strictly advantageous, or even a net advantage in most circumstances, was already incorporated into the design of the gun itself.

The ubiquity and versatility of virtual worlds meant that as soon as they had a single functional prototype of any new theoretical weapon, they could program its features and drawbacks into combat simulations. There, the weapon could be tested in a broad variety of circumstances at almost no cost, so innovation came fast and cheap. The only real expense was in physical prototypes, to make sure they actually worked and there was no variable forgotten in the sim, although even that was more formality than anything. Humanity had been making sims for a very long time, and they were very very good at it.

When he had collected all his usual mods, he grabbed a pistol and affixed it to his left hip, handle facing forward. Then he grabbed a backup rifle, a knife, and a heavy shield and stepped into the capsule inside the tube, shutting the door behind him.

Modern human dropships used a scaled up version of the firing mechanism of their guns to launch troops at the ground from several miles above the ground. In the event that anything survived the troops hitting the ground, either by getting out of the way or by being just that tough, the troops inside would continue the fight. They were developed after humanity was fully unified though, so they had never been deployed in a real combat scenario.

When his capsule hit the ground, he kicked out the door and rolled forward rifle in hand, scanning his surroundings as he did so. The area was blanketed in a thick fog, save for where the impact of the capsule had pushed it aside. He switched to thermals, and checked again. Nothing. Ultraviolet? Nothing.

He sighed internally. This was one of the 'impenetrable fog' courses. He hated those. There was no known weather condition, natural or artificial, which could block all or even most of the vision modes standard in every human war body, but the top brass felt it was important that he be prepared, just in case. The N7 could detect anything from gamma rays to radio waves, and convert it into usable visual data, but there was no real need. Outside of the simulations of their own design, humanity had never encountered anything which was opaque to the infrared, ultraviolet and visible spectrum radiation, but not opaque to just about everything else.

Still, best to be on the safe side. He set an out of the way part of his field of vision to run through various frequencies, and activated his echolocation. Every noise, even the soft tramp of his boots on the ground, caused a light to appear in his field of vision, wherever the noise was coming from.

He trudged forward slowly, his hands gripping his rifle tightly, a flash of light on the periphery of his vision accompanied a noise off to his right side. he dropped to his knees and leveled his rifle at the source of the noise. He pulled the trigger and tore three small holes in the large furry creature before him. The holes went right through one of the creatures eyeholes. If it had a brain back there, it would be dead.

Evidently though, this creature did not have such an obvious weak spot. He could keep shooting, perhaps attempt to blind the creature and hope it had no way of aiming the thing in its hands - which looked like some sort of large, organic rifle - without the use of its eyes. But that would take time, and he had no way of knowing who would last longer in a battle of attrition. Against an unknown foe, push for victory as fast as you can. Every second the battle lasts gives you more information about how they fight, but that works both ways, and the longer a fight is the more time they have to realize they are outmatched and pull out all the stops. Better to kill it quick, and find out what it can do in the post-mortem, than to find out its abilities when it uses them against you.

Shepard set the rifle to overload its battery, and tossed it at the creature as it began pelting him with an energy beam from its 'rifle', which cut a shallow gouge across his right shoulder, but did not pierce his armor. The creature pitched to the left away from the rifle as Shepard dodged to the right away from the beam.

Shepard grabbed a pebble off the ground and flicked it at the rifle, pushing it under the creature as it exploded, tearing it to shreds and knocking Shepard off his feet. Shepard rallied in an instant, rising with his shield on his left arm, and his pistol in his right. The material of his armor, which was more like a collection of microscopic beings than a simple carapace, knit itself back together around the wound. It was not quite as strong as initially, but it could take another hit or two without buckling.

A flash of light all around his field of vision warned him of a sound from behind, and he whipped around raising his shield to protect his face. Aiming his pistol around the shield - transparent in the AR overlay granted by his combat VI - he fired two shots at another of the creatures. .

The pistol did not fire solid metal slugs, but inch long cases containing of dozens of pellets wrapped in a polymer shell, with a single explosive charge and a very simple computer in the center. The pistol's onboard computer calculated the distance to the target and the time it would take the shell to travel given the muzzle velocity, and relayed that information to the shell, which would detonate when it was ten centimeters from the target. The result was a cloud of bullets moving on average as fast as regular rounds, hitting everything in a circle about ten centimeters wide. Humanity had long since phased out shotguns, but the development of these rounds allowed for all the potential benefits of the shotgun, but usable at any range.

The two shells tore massive chunks of flesh from the creature's head and the center of its torso, ensuring that if it was not dead, it was at the very least blind, likely deaf, and possibly immobile from damage it its spinal column. If it had one.

The downside to using such powerful rounds was the limited amount of ammunition he could carry. _Ten shots left_ , Shepard thought. He could always read his ammo count on his HUD, but he seldom needed it. An uplifted human has perfect recall, so as long as he kept counting his shots, he would never lose track. He only needed the ammo count for situations in which he had to fire while focusing his attention elsewhere.

A flicker of movement in the corner of his vision that was running through the radiation spectrum caught his eye, in the microwave region. He broadened it to his whole field of vision and saw four more of the creatures through the fog, unfortunately at the exact moment they all seemed to notice him.

He dropped to the ground, rotated his shield horizontally, and turned so that the roughly 120 degree arc of his shield covered three of them, then turned his pistol and opened fire at the same time they did. The three that were covered by his shield struck at it with their strange rifles, and it began to dissolve as the fourth traded fire with him. The creature's shot hit him right underneath his right arm, piercing his armor and tearing through several of his more vital regulatory mechanisms. He had to end the fight soon, or his body would begin to malfunction.

The one he hit fell almost instantly, but his shield would not last even a full second under their attacks, and one of the creatures was moving to flank him.

He thrust his feet into the ground, and jumped nearly two meters in the air as he brought his pistol around, and accelerated his perception as much as he was able. With his mind working at roughly four times its ordinary speed, he brought his pistol around, aimed it at the creatures heads and one by one pulled the trigger.

He could only use the accelerated perception, colloquially known as "bullet time", for a few subjective seconds at a time, or the demand on his processors would cause them to overheat and burn out, but it was usually enough.

When he hit the ground, he fired one more shot into the torso of each of the creatures, then began to dismember them with his knife, just to be sure.

"All targets down." boomed the automated voice of the simulator.

Shepard clapped his hands once more, queued up another simulation, and waited for it to load.


End file.
